Otis College of Art and Design is pleased to host the Los Angeles Portfolio Day on January 15, 2017 from 12-4pm!

Bring your portfolio for an informal review by representatives from art and design schools, and learn about their programs of study. Portfolio Day events are held across the country, high school students, parents, teachers, guidance counselors and college transfer students are encouraged to attend.

In acoustical engineering, “tuning the room” is a technique for measuring the specific sound properties of an enclosed space and then adapting the environment to improve its acoustic reflections. New York-based artist Anna Craycroft applies this technique both literally and metaphorically to the Ben Maltz Gallery for her exhibition Tuning the Room. Craycroft’s exhibition asks that we consider how the specific characteristics of an environment shape our experience within it, and how we become attuned in return.

Robin Coste Lewis won the National Book Award for Voyage of the Sable Venus. Her writing has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Callaloo, The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Transition: Women in Literary Arts, VIDA, Phantom Limb, and Lambda Literary Review. She has taught at Wheaton, Hunter, Hampshire, and the NYU Low-Residency MFA in Paris. Lewis is a fellow of Cave Canem and of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, as well as a Provost’s Fellow in Poetry and Visual Studies at USC.

Solmaz Sharif’s first collection, Look, was recently published by Graywolf Press and is a 2016 National Book Award finalist. Her poetry has appeared in the New Republic, Granta, Poetry, and other journals. Her first collection, Look, was recently published by Graywolf Press. A former Stegner Fellow, she is currently a lecturer at Stanford University and lives in the Bay Area.

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Using Search Engines

There is no central index or catalog to the Internet. There are many search engines you can use to find the free information on the World Wide Web.

Parts of a Search Engine

Spider (or Crawler). This is software which visits pages on the Web, reading page titles, body copy and other elements. It learns about new pages by following links. A database with copies of every web page visited by the spider is created at the search engine site.

Index. Like a giant book of all the words in the database with pointers to the web pages that contain those words.

Searching Software. This is software that sifts through the millions of pages recorded in the index to find matches to a search. It ranks them in order of relevancy, based on a formula or algorithm.

Directory. Most search engines now also have directories, a hierarchical menu of sites created by people rather than software.

Although search engines have the basic parts described above, there are differences in how these parts are tuned. That is why the same search on different search engines often produces different results.

Tips for Effective Searching:

The trick for getting what you want from a search engine is to give the search engine as much detail as you can about the topic. Instead of typing a single word into the engine, type a phrase or series of words which are specific to the topic. For instance, to find out more about searching for information on the Internet, enter "searching the Internet" instead of "search." There are many ways to control your search. You will increase your search effectiveness by practicing using only one or two search engines until you have learned all the features and the type of information found through it. Information on features of each search engine can be found in the "help" or "search tips" sections.

Special Search Features (Syntax):

Phrase searching. Often putting the words of a phrase in quotes will cause the engine to look only for those words together:
"chocolate cake"